The XX Factor
How Working Women are Creating a New Society
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
For most of history, being female defined the limits of a woman's achievements. But now, women are successful careerists equal to men. In Norway, women legally must constitute a third of all boards; in America, women have gone from 3% of practising lawyers in 1970 to 40% today, and over half of all law students.
These changes are revolutionary - but not universal: the 'sisterhood' of working women is deeply divided. Making enormous strides in the workplace are young, educated, full-time professionals who have put children on hold. But for a second group of women this is unattainable: instead, they work part-time, earn less, are concentrated in heavily feminised occupations like cleaning and gain income and self-worth from having children young.
As these two groups move ever further apart, shared gender no longer automatically creates interests in common with other women. The XX Factor lifts the curtain on these social, cultural and economic schisms.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this provocative and vital new book, British economist Wolf (Does Education Matter?) addresses the "widening gap" between highly educated professional women and less-educated working women. The consequences of this gap run deep. Education affects whether women have children, how many they have, and at what age they have them; how early they have sex; how likely they are to divorce; and, critically, how much money they earn. The book's first section addresses women in the workforce and covers higher education and money (including the return of the servant classes, without which "elite women's employment would splutter and stall"); the second addresses the domestic sphere, including sexual behavior ("With the Pill everything changed"). While the book focuses on British and American women's lives, Wolf's cross-cultural view traverses the globe (she discusses China, India, France, Sweden, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, to name a few, but not sub-Saharan Africa); nor are men absent from her analyses. Accessibly written and enlivened with anecdotes and interviews, Wolf's research is thoroughly documented and features uncommonly informative footnotes and helpful graphs. Her assessment of how things have changed since the time when "marriage was women's main objective and main career" and the ways in which "the modern workplace detaches our female elites from both history and the rest of female-kind" will yield productive controversy.
